Florida school shooter kills 17 people, alleges demon voices telling him to kill

Suspect Nikolas Cruz. File Pic

The man alleged to have shot dead 17 people in the Parkland Florida school massacre had heard demons ordering him to "burn, kill, destroy," police transcripts released on Monday showed.

Nikolas Cruz, 19, was detained without resistance shortly after the February 14 attack in Parkland, north of Miami, and was questioned in the Broward County Sheriff's Office. According to the transcript of the interrogation, detective John Curcio offered him a glass of water. "I do not deserve it," Cruz remarked. When the officer briefly left the room to look for water anyway, Cruz said to himself: "Kill me, just kill me."

Then he told the detective that demons in his head, which had started tormenting him years earlier told him to "buy weapons, kill animals and destroy everything."
"What are the demons?" the detective asked. "The voices," Cruz said. "The evil side". "What does your voice say to you?" Curcio asked. "Burn. Kill. Destroy," he replied. Cruz said he had attempted suicide two months before the attack after his mother's death in November 2017 with an overdose of the painkiller Ibuprofen.

Cruz said that he was depressed by his lack of friends and his loneliness. When the detective asked him why he had decided to buy a semi-automatic rifle - an AR-15 - the one he allegedly used in the massacre, he replied: "Because it looks cool." Cruz bought the rifle legally.

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